One does not arrive in Venice, esteemed reader, dear reader; one dissolves into it.
For the usual arrival – that bourgeois procedure in which one gets out of a car, sets one’s foot on solid ground, tests the air and says to oneself: Here I am – is only half possible in this city. The ground is there, to be sure; it is even astonishingly reliable, when you consider that it rests on something that contradicts the ground. But beneath the solid slab, beneath the stone, beneath the steps and thresholds is the water; it is not backdrop, not ornament, not spa pool, not “feature”, but bearer. It bears. It bears houses, it bears boats, it bears sounds, and it bears – that is the worst – time.
Hans Castorp had, at the end of the previous day, somewhere between tunnel and curve, between mountain and flatland, seen the water on the horizon, as if it were a sentence that one suddenly understands because one finally hears it spoken aloud. In doing so, as he now did almost everything, he had looked at the ring: at the time, at the pulse, at the steps – and he had thought, very slowly, very clearly: He counts everything. Just not that.
Now he stood, before he had quite grasped that the train had really stopped, on a platform that, as platforms do, pretends to be a piece of the world. It was warm. Not the well-tempered warmth of the Sonnenalp, which is conducted through pipes and promised in brochures; it was a warmth that comes from the air, that creeps into clothing and that one cannot “switch off” by touching an app. This warmth did not smell of hotel linen and cedar, not of disinfectant and bathrobe; it smelled of diesel, of wet stone, of salt, of something sweetish that one only later recognizes as decay, because the senses are polite and like to wrap the abyss in perfume.
Gustav von A. walked ahead.
He did not walk hastily. He did not walk at all like a person who is arriving. He walked like a person who is carrying out something he has already written for himself. In his hand he carried his notebook; and the notebook was, as always, not open, but it was present, as if he were carrying not paper but the proof of his existence.
Hans Castorp followed him.
He did not carry his suitcase; he had let it roll, as modernity prescribes, as if it wanted to abolish carrying so that one would have nothing left to deal with but oneself. In his right hand he held, almost unconsciously, the bottle of hibiscus white tea that he had filled in the morning; and when he noticed that he was holding it, he had to – as so often before – smile at himself. For how ridiculous it is, he thought, to come to a city that has lived from water for centuries and to bring one’s own water along, deep red, measured out, infused, filtered, as if one had to pass the world through a sieve before one were allowed to drink it.
He did not drink.
He smelled.
And he saw.
The first thing one saw, when one stepped out through the exit from the platform, was not a street. It was an opening. It was a view that led into the open – and the open was not land but water. One saw, behind a railing, the water of the Canal Grande, greenish, sluggish and at the same time in constant motion, because, like time, it never really calms down. Boats glided past, vaporetti, taxis, barges; people stood in them like figures in a theater that does not take itself seriously because it is too old for seriousness.
Hans Castorp stopped for a moment.
Not out of admiration; admiration is a pose, and he was, despite all peak form, too much a man of sensations to strike a pose so quickly. He stopped because his body – that faithful registrar – did something he did not know from the Sonnenalp: it let the senses leap outward without immediately making a program out of it. And at the same time Hans Castorp felt how his inner self, which had so long been in the service of measurement, was seeking a hold, a sentence, a name.
“There it is,” said Gustav von A. without turning around.
“What?” asked Hans Castorp.
Gustav von A. raised his hand, as if pointing to something that cannot be missed, and said:
“South.”
Hans Castorp looked at the water.
It was dismally comical that a word consisting of five characters should be expected to accomplish so much; and yet it did. For “South” here was not a point of the compass, not weather, not temperature; it was a promise that, with every smell, every reflection of light, every sip of air, confirmed that the mountain, however much it can be in one, is not the whole. The mountain was order above. The South was disorder below. And disorder has, if one has grown accustomed to order long enough, something seductive, almost moral: it feels like freedom.
Gustav von A. set himself in motion.
Hans Castorp followed.
